Time: The Present collects the best short stories of one of the finest American writers of the 1930s, Tess Slesinger. An Academy Award-winning screenwriter, Tess Slesinger was one of the most innovative and original short story writers of her generation. She dealt with issues of sexuality, economics, race, and the complex relationships between men and women in and out of marriage that remain highly relevant today. Slesinger's stories can be satirical, comic, bittersweet, or tragic--but most of all, always immediate. As Vivian Gornick puts it in her eloquent introduction, Slesinger's 'feeling for life's unavoidable sorrow remains haunting.' Taking great stylistic risks, Slesinger freed her stories of the constraints of period and place and created works that are timeless in their impact and approach. Time: The Present restores Slesinger's rightful place as one of the greats of the 20th century short story form. It includes numerous stories from The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and other magazines collected here for the first time. Time: The Present continues Recovered Books' mission to bring long forgotten books of exceptional merit and resounding relevance to today's readers.

One need only read the first lines of Tess Slesinger's title story-or indeed any of her stories-to know that hers is a unique literary voice, one that rivets a reader's attention to the page from the very beginning and holds it to the very end. Hers is, one soon discovers, also a wholly feminine voice: compelling, filled with insight, acute at observation, sure of its tone, and everywhere discovering the reality behind human appearances and pretensions. This is a remarkable collection of short stories by a brilliant young writer who was cut off in her prime when she died of cancer in 1945. “An intensely feminine book, in which bleakness, unemployment, heartache and heartlessness are combined with an agreeable feeling of settling down for conversation with an intimate, disillusioned, gossipy, malicious and often witty friend.”- New Statesman . “A genuine short-story writer...she has a good eye for the little tombstones of life.”- Nation .